


Why the Caged Bird Sings

by strixarc



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Concussions, Depression, Drinking, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Oral Sex, Post-Canon, Rough Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Scheming, Sexual Slavery, Sexual Violence, Spoilers for Season 3, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence, dubcon, i guess??, it's dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:41:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23060368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strixarc/pseuds/strixarc
Summary: "Let us share in this, shall we?”Lenore giggles at his answer and finishes pouring the last of the wine into the second glass. She sets the bottle down gingerly on the table and Hector eyes it for any signs of previous tampering. It’s only when she gestures for him to sit that he blinks away his suspicions and sits down. Be a good, obedient pet. Put on airs.
Relationships: Hector/Lenore (Castlevania)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 200





	Why the Caged Bird Sings

If there was one thing Hector had learned during his forcible internment at Styria, it was that nights in the stronghold were long and unrelenting. This could be attributed in part, of course, to the gaggles of vampires crawling and stamping around the perimeters of the castle, constantly on guard for attacks directed towards them by angry human, beastly, and otherwise unintelligent forms of life outside the city walls, but Hector found their presence negligible. Even when he was allowed outside, he hardly noticed the vampiric soldiers’ presence anymore. He had been more than desensitized to the glinting, moonlit fangs and pale - almost translucent - skin; his company had been nothing but vampires and beastly creations of his own design for over a year, and these soldiers and this capital specifically for several months.

The other - and most outwardly glaring - reason nights seemed so long was that he was often left on his own for nearly torturous periods of time. Abandoned, like some abused and hurt dog, and pathetic enough to warrant a few sympathetic glances from soldiers brave enough to cast their eyes to him - he had overheard Carmilla one evening warning Striga that not a soul was to acknowledge the Forgemaster’s presence, both within the castle and out within Styria’s vast common grounds. It was yet another way to control him, he realized, and make him feel dependent on the four women holding his metaphorical (and not-so-metaphorical) leash. They lave attention and praise upon him when he performs his tricks like some traveling circus monkey and everyone else pretends he doesn’t exist. There’s a fine line, he supposes, to torment and comfort, dependence and illusory freedom, and Styria’s councilwomen knew how to toe that line with confidence and ease.

Hector sighs from his perch upon the back of the window seat, his legs partially stretched out to press his booted toes against the dark wood frame of the large aperture. There were plush cushions underneath him and cradled around his thighs, obviously part of a set that the window seat had been purchased with if the intricate, winding golden designs were anything to go by. The red fabric was soft and warm against his body, especially in contrast to the frost on the window seeping into his bones through his loose and thin white blouse. 

He had been treated well,  _ nauseatingly  _ well, since Lenore had taken him into her fold - into the entire council’s fold, and the anger and confusion at his new place at the table had resulted in Lenore returning to his chambers to find the entire place an upturned, unholy mess several times. She had taken a strict hand with him, of course, and his pushing back had awarded him with several new welts across his back and bottom from a leather crop meant for the damn horses. He had been forced to clean his mess through tears and blood in his mouth from biting down on his tongue and after a few times, he had made the decision to cease intentionally getting on her - on  _ any  _ of their bad sides.

Even if he didn’t outright disobey them anymore, at least not physically such as destroying his room in the keep, it didn’t mean Hector had become any less complacent. He hated this room, with its deep red walls, its gold-plated wall decorations and lantern holders, the goddamn crystal chandelier that hung over the entranceway, and especially this fucking window. It taunted him more than anything - promising death, freedom, or both each time he made his way over to it, just like a moth is drawn to a flame that in turn burns its wings to a fine ash. Several times he had contemplated jumping through the thick, engraved glass and sparing himself from further trouble and humiliation, but he had abandoned the thought soon after his third month spent in near-quiet, gilded solitude. Not to mention, Carmilla had been quick to find a smithy able to craft thick and enchanted bars of iron grated across the panes after Lenore had expressed her own concerns about Hector’s longing stares towards it. Not even Hell itself could penetrate that window, either inward or out, Hector reckoned. The bars were necessary, Lenore reasoned with him afterwards, to ensure his safety. Hector simply responded that no bird was completely captive without a cage to ensnare it. The remark had earned him another beating and no more was said about it.

Hector draws a deep breath into his lungs and lets his head drop back against the shallow wall’s edge. His fingers play idly with the ring around his finger, running his thumb over the inside of the weaved metal and being careful not to jostle it too much. He’s well aware of what it can do, of what it can make him feel, and he’s not exactly eager to repeat what had happened when he intentionally tried to remove it - namely, writhing around on the floor begging for death until Striga found him in the otherwise empty corridor and dragged him before the rest of her sisters. The pain had lasted for hours afterwards, even as Morana’s sickeningly sweet words echoed in his ears and he felt Lenore’s cool tongue against his too-hot skin. Their touch alone was far from enough to numb his senses, alight with a pain so white-hot that he felt he might melt into the sisters’ shared bed and navy blue, embellished duvet. He doesn’t remember much after that, just blackness overtaking his sight as Lenore kissed down the length of his body while Striga watched uninterested and icy from the doorway.

A click at the doorway to his room pulls him forcibly from his thoughts and he looks towards it placidly, watching as the rug before the opening door bunches against it. He hears a voice - a familiar one - curse at the offending rug before a foot appears from beneath a long skirt to straighten the fabric out and the door closes with a soft click. Hector turns his attention back to the frost at the corners of the window and he feels the muscles in his jaw twitch at the sound of movement. He remains obediently quiet and passive even as soft, barely-there footsteps approach him and he has to do his best not to flinch when a seemingly frail and dainty hand touches his shoulder with the barest of touches.

“Hector,” he hears his name spoken and the tenderness - real or fake, he’s stopped being able to tell the difference at this point - makes his chest ache and the fingers of his right hand clench momentarily into a fist. “You’ve been up here quite a while. Surely the caravan traders coming and going cannot be  _ that  _ entertaining.”

He doesn’t laugh at the joke, mouth pressed into a tight line, but he hears a soft chuckle from beside him. Hector knows Lenore is expecting him to answer and even though his brain is screaming at him to rebel, to act out, to capture her neck beneath his hands and squeeze until the very last fiery signs of life have left her scarlet-gold eyes, but he betrays himself out of habit and trepid fear of retaliation and turns his head to meet her gaze. She’s looking at him patiently, something playful and teasing in her smirking expression and her one thin, arched eyebrow.

“I got tired of wandering the halls aimlessly and it’s too frigid out to do much of anything. So I ended up back here.” Hector is proud of the evenness in his voice, even if it does waver a bit in the beginning. Days of solitude and lack of company have taken their toll on his vocal cords and he winces at the raspiness of his throat. It feels as if a fine sandpaper has been grating against the back of his tongue and he subconsciously reaches a hand up to rub at the patch of skin next to his Adam’s apple. Lenore laughs, soft and sweet, in front of him and pulls her hand back to stand upright.

“I believe I remember Carmilla suggesting that on days like these you can always find refuge in your armory,” she winks at him and he holds himself back from grimacing. His ‘armory’, sure. Little more than a hole in the earth hardly big enough to move around in, let alone craft innumerable night creatures for his captor’s army. Nearly three hundred had been made in the last week alone, but any less two hundred would earn him a beating and a warning to work faster, work harder, work until he would have to be carried from his workspace manually. Five hundred or more within ten days would earn him something ‘better’, by all accounts - a ‘reward’ for his hard work - but it always left him feeling as if he needed to scrub every inch of his skin raw. He doesn’t work close to that anymore. “But I can understand not wanting to work down there in the cold. It’s freezing!”

Lenore brings her arm up and shivers theatrically, making a face that reminds Hector of a child putting on a show for her parents. A sour taste permeates the back of his mouth and he looks back towards the window, trying not to look at his reflection. He can almost  _ feel  _ Lenore pouting at his aloof lack of attention directed at her and his suspicions are confirmed when she uses one clawed hand to guide his face gently back to viewing her as the other traces against his arm. He feels his jaw twitch again at the contact but he holds her gaze evenly and does his best to keep his expression neutral.

“Hector,” she pouts, jutting her bottom lip out and furrowing her eyebrows together. “I can’t be that unpleasant to look at that you’d prefer a  _ window  _ to me. Surely.”

“No.” Hector says and he hates that he  _ means  _ it. Lenore is gorgeous, they’re both well aware of this. Hector has never been one to see the beauty in others further than cursory glances and late-night musings, but the way Lenore’s hair catches candlelight as if it’s made of Hell’s fire itself and how her lips curl into a full and gentle smile overtop pointed fangs does not escape him at the best of times. At the worst, he finds himself captivated by her, by the way she moves across the castle’s floors as if floating ten inches above the ground with nothing to impede her movement and by the way she whispers, whines, and screams his name during the night. His minor infatuation with her that he developed in the bowels of the keep’s dungeon has neither dissipated nor been forgotten by either of them -despite of all that’s happened, much to his horror - and Lenore makes it a point to bring it up at every opportunity in which it may serve to embarrass him in some way or another.

Lenore smiles at his response. “Good boy. Would you care for some wine? I snuck it away from the cabinet in the council hall just for the occasion.” The redhead’s eyes glow with mischief against the wall-mounted candles on either side of the window alcove and Hector blinks with surprise. Lenore seldom offered wine be brought to him in his bedroom, and even more rarely brought it directly to him without asking first. Plus, if she were telling the truth, which Hector had long since discovered she is the most forthcoming of every damned vampire in Styria, that would mean that she had stolen directly from Carmilla’s stores herself. Which wasn’t anything  _ too  _ unusual, but it was unusual to do so for  _ his  _ sake.

She reaches into the belly of her robes and pulls out a shiny, ocean-green bottle with a cork still stuck firmly in the top and she cocks her head to the side, letting her hair fall in wavy rivulets to frame the curve of her face. Hector finds his eyes almost being forced to follow the full, youthful roundness of her cheek, down to her chin to where the tannish fur of her cloak threatens to tickle at her lips. He nods without really even registering the motion and she chirps with girlish glee as she glides her way over to the small round wooden table set up in the corner of Hector’s room, just adjacent to the window seat. Hector blinks again and twists his body away from the window, bringing his feet down under him to rest on the plush seat cushions. He winces at the informality of putting his dirty boots (even though they haven’t seen pavement in a day), so deeply ingrained into his mind by now and quickly makes his way down off the window ledge. 

“You stole from Carmilla?” Hector asks with an air of confusion about him concerning Lenore’s actions. He really should have stopped trying to understand her and her intentions long ago, but it still encourages a small niggling of fear to gather at the base of his skull. Lenore’s intentions, he’s learned, often come with numerous invisible strings attached and he’d like to know what he’s agreeing to. “Won’t she be upset with you?”

_ ‘With me’  _ is what he truly means to ask, though, and they’re both aware of it. He watches with cautious eyes as Lenore hums to herself, a smile still in place on the curve of her lips, and fetches two empty glasses from the far side of the table to use. The bread basket is still half-full from this morning and Hector is grateful for it, else he’d be drinking wine on an otherwise empty stomach. He hasn’t had much of an appetite recently if he were honest, and he suspects that it has something to do with Carmilla’s determination to work him to within the far reaches of his life. She gracefully flicks the cork out of the bottle with one clawed finger and Hector’s entire body seems to flinch and recoil at the sound. If Lenore notices this, she doesn’t betray it.

“Don’t worry. Carmilla is protective of her personal stock, but anything in the council hall is fair game for us. Remember, dearest Hector, that we’re equals now.” Lenore pauses after filling one glass to a suitable amount of red wine - the  _ reddest  _ Hector has ever seen, if he were quite honest - and gestures airily to his left hand. “Wine-sharing between us is just one of the perks.”

Hector blinks before he remembers what possibly be considered a ‘perk’ on his left hand and brings said hand up to inspect the twisted red and black band of metal resting innocently around his finger. A moment of melancholy washes over him as he remembers that his entire life up to this point, his hopes and successes and failures and freedom has amounted to nothing more than this thin ring around his finger, threatening and bitter and mocking in all the ways it taunts him because of it. A reminder of what he had, what he lost, and what is surely in store for him in the future: more of the same, more of being held under someone else’s thumb while he’s powerless to stop it, being used like a toy for the sake of someone else’s tantrum. The thought of this fucking ring on his finger makes him want to rip it off his skin, God above  _ damn  _ the consequences to the deepest pits of hell along with all of his new comrades. His eyebrows knit together and he forces the fury and shame and anguish bubbling and twisting like snakes in his gut to settle. 

He has airs to put on that he’s unaffected. That he’s a good little pet now; obedient and pliable under the council’s hands. So he does just that.

“I’m glad,” Hector smiles, though it hardly reaches his eyes. He takes no relief in the fact that Lenore has not cost him another beating and squashes the voice in his brain that tells him that it isn’t even supposed to be something he should have to worry himself to sickness over. “Then let us share in this, shall we?”

Lenore giggles at his answer and finishes pouring the last of the wine into the second glass. She sets the bottle down gingerly on the table and Hector eyes it for any signs of previous tampering. It’s only when she gestures for him to sit that he blinks away his suspicions and sits down. Be a good, obedient pet. Put on airs.

“I hear you’ve been working incredibly hard on your Forging recently. Nearly a thousand this month.” Lenore sits and takes the wine glass’s stem between her thin fingers, swirling the liquid inside for a brief second to mix the flavor before taking a small sip. Hector decides it’s sufficient enough to prove that it isn’t poisoned or otherwise foul and takes a sip from his own glass. A bitter dryness washes against his tongue and it’s strong enough that he has to resist the urge to gag as it drags itself down his throat, burning as it does so as if it had claws and was resisting being devoured. He manages not to cough, but the taste combined with the uncomfortable burn in his stomach makes him wince subtly. He reaches for a loaf of bread.

“No more than usual. Striga suggested I’d better work harder before Carmilla makes parts of me into furniture.”

“I believe the wording was that she’d ‘make your penis and scrotum into a lampshade’,” Lenore giggles and even though he finds it less than humorous himself, Hector manages a small smile as he bites into his bread. “You mustn’t worry about her. She talks a big game but she wouldn’t discourage your work.”

“My work somehow involves my penis and scrotum, then?” Hector raises an eyebrow.

Lenore laughs and tosses a sly wink in his direction. “Perhaps occasionally. Moreso for your rewards than your actual work, I suppose.”

“Rewarding me with sex isn’t exactly much of a reward if you offer outside of the parameters of work.” Hector takes another sip of the wine and focuses his attention on the grain of the wood table to avoid Lenore’s prying gaze.

“There isn’t much else we can offer,” Lenore breathes out and lets herself relax against the back of the cushioned chair. Her wine glass dangles precariously over the arm of the chair but never falls from between her index finger and thumb. Hector shifts his focus to it and Lenore swirls it slowly upon noticing his gaze. “You have food, water, a place to bathe and sleep - there is no carrot to dangle in front of you aside from sex.”

Hector frowns deeply. “My freedom. I would kill myself with work for that.”

“Hector. Oh, Hector, Hector,” Lenore tuts her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the tips of her fangs showing against the pinkness of her lips. Hector refocuses his attention on her face and he feels his expression harden at how her eyes close and those auburn eyebrows shoot upwards in a taunting mask of sadness. His fingers clench in his lap and around the wine glass stem and for a split second he’s worried the thin strip of glass will break under the pressure. “How I wish I could simply grant you your freedom to be on your merry way, to walk the way of the caravan and never look back. But Carmilla has too many things planned for you at the moment.”

“And would would that be? Fuck me until I die?”

Lenore laughs and Hector can actually tell it’s genuine this time. “No! No, those are  _ my  _ plans. I did mean it that you’re good at sex; at least, you’re better than most men, whose idea of sex is to stick their unimpressive penises into me until they come.”

“Oh,” Hector can’t tell if its the bluntness about such things that he still has yet to get accompanied to or the wine or possibly both, but he feels a warm flush spread across the bridge of his nose to the outer line of his cheeks. He looks down at his glass and swirls his own wine. “What then, if I may ask? Turning me?”

“Goodness no! Carmilla wouldn’t be stupid enough to do  _ that _ .” Lenore scoffs and crosses one leg over the other, bouncing her foot idly. Hector resists the urge to watch it. “Can you imagine? A Forgemaster  _ and  _ a vampire? There’s almost no fun in that, even just thinking about it! You’d be…” Lenore sucks in a soft breath, her lips parted and eyes suddenly far away. “Untouchable.”

This was something Hector had come to appreciate about Lenore when she got deep into a conversation: her transparency concerning what-ifs and their outcomes was something he’d never encountered previously. It was this honesty that provided him a glimpse into her mind, beyond what any given book in the library he’d been given access to could afford him. She pulled no punches in any sense of the word, baring herself to him openly. It was part of the reason, he supposed, she became such an important source of information for him to use during his imprisonment. Although he would slit her and every one of her sisters’ throats if given the barest opportunity, Hector could at least appreciate her honesty.

Her eyes refocus once more and settle comfortably on his face as he takes another distracted sip from his glass. “Hector, may I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

Lenore sets her glass down with a soft clink upon the surface of the table before them and Hector finds himself mirroring her action. She leans towards him and he has to force himself to remain still, resisting his instinct to lean back and away from her inquisitive face. Her eyes are burning holes into his own and Hector can’t help but swallow thickly at the unrelenting, intense gaze.

“Do you hold a grudge against me? Against us? For how we treated you?”

The question makes Hector want to bark out a harsh, grating laugh and bring the resting wine bottle crashing across the back of her skull.  _ Treated _ ? As if it’s to say that his torture has ceased altogether now that they feed him regularly and are so generous as to fuck him every once in a while? The idea alone is laughable and so ridiculous that his composure breaks for a brief moment and he finds himself releasing a confused chuckle from the depths of his chest. Lenore frowns in front of him, eyes glinting in the relatively dim light of the room.

“Is something funny?” She asks, voice edging on irritation.

“A grudge,” Hector confirms, finally able to take the momentary lapse of control by the scruff and arrest it back down into the depths of his mind. “For what? Holding me against my will? Beating me senseless? Forcing me to work myself to death for you? Lending you my cock every so often?”

“Hector.” Lenore warns.

Hector can feel that bubbling in his chest again, along with the taste of bile at the opening of his throat. His hands clench in his lap and he’s overcome with a sudden rush of courage that he hasn’t felt in entirely too long, not since this nightmare came to fruition. He stands, then, and Lenore’s eyes widen at the sudden movement, but he leans forward against the table and before she can pull herself back, Hector has his face mere millimeters from hers. He can smell the sweetness of the wine on her breath, feel the puffs of air escape from between her lips and bounce softly against his chin, and he thinks again to strangle her until there’s nothing left but a shell of a corpse on the floor. His fingernails dig against the grain of the table.

“You’ve kept me here as a plaything, a toy to pick up and use whenever you get bored of arguing with your sisters, who you then hand me off to like I’m a commodity to be traded for good graces. I listen, like a damn fool, and hope that perhaps by cowering in obedience that I may somehow gain a sliver of good favor. And you ask if I hold a grudge against you?” Hector grits his teeth but a scoff escapes through his nostrils as he bares his teeth down at Lenore. “Hardly. Does the mouse hold a grudge against the cat for devouring it? The fly condemn the spider for catching it in its web?”

“Hector.” Lenore warns again, standing as well but not widening the distance between their faces. Perhaps it’s the shift in light in this new position, but her eyes seem darker, fiercer, than they were before. It sends a nervous shiver up Hector’s spine and he lowers his voice to a mumble, though it’s deep and punctuated with a growl, and he brings a hand up to grip her thin wrist like a vice.

“If the prey is so foolish as to be caught in the hunter’s traps again and again,” Hector brings his hand holding Lenore’s wrist up to his lips and he opens his mouth to drag his teeth long her skin. Her gaze remains intense and unwavering under his own and he feels the muscles under her skin in her arm contract as she clenches her hand into a fist. “Then perhaps it is unfit to survive. There is a certain gratitude in that death, not resentment. Mercy.”

Suddenly, like lightning striking the ground, Hector finds himself on the hardwood floor of the room, a nauseating ache in his cheek the only indication that Lenore has put him there. She stands tall and stock-still above him, like a predator about to devour its prey, and Hector can’t help but find some humor in his words. He chuckles again, though it’s punctuated with a wince as pain radiates throughout his entire face from where he was struck. Lenore moves swiftly to climb atop him, grabbing each of his wrists and pinning them back behind his head. She stares him down, baring her fangs at him and hissing and Hector can see a strange color at the corner of her eyes that was certainly not there before. He swallows.

“You dare have the audacity to ask me to outright kill you? After all I’ve done to ensure you remain safe in this blasted city? The only reason you  _ aren’t  _ dead yet is because I enjoy you, Hector. The only reason you aren’t dead is because you are  _ mine _ .”

Hector keeps his expression neutral even though Lenore’s grip threatens to turn the bones in his wrists to a fine powder. “Then perhaps it is not me that is the prey after all, little fly.”

Lenore hisses again and Hector sees the flash of fangs in her mouth before she’s lunging forward. It would be foolish to think that she is going for a killing blow, he knows, but that doesn’t stop him from tilting his head slightly to the side to allow her more access to his jugular. Instead, she captures his mouth with her own and pinches her knees together on either side of his waist, pinning him to the floor with ease. He gasps at the spark of pain in his lower ribs at the added pressure and the second he opens his mouth, her tongue goes to work tangling with his own. His eyebrows knit together and he clenches his eyes shut tightly, alcohol-slowed mind struggling to keep up with this turn of events. If he were honest with himself though, most of his nights with Lenore ended up like this: with her tongue in his mouth and his body pinned to some surface for her to do with as she pleases. He feels the pricking of tears at the corners of his eyes before he swallows his pride and cants his hips up and to the side, rolling them with relative ease without breaking the contact between their lips. If he’s going to be humiliated yet again, he might as well do it on shared terms.

Lenore growls and hisses underneath him, legs snaking around his waist and holding him there like a boa constrictor trapping its prey for the killing squeeze. Hector trails his hands up her thighs, balancing himself on his knees and crouching over her body as her arms wrap around his shoulders to clasp her hands together at the back of his head, forcing him in closer to herself. His hands come to rest at her hips, forcing her skirts and cloak back to grant him access and she mewls against him, breaking their kiss to let a soft whine escape her and Hector notices a line of spit is still connecting their lips. She makes a face up at him.

“Naughty boy, what do you think you’re doing?”

“You said I’ve worked hard recently. I’m taking my reward early.” He leans in close to suck and nip at the pale column of her throat and she arches her back, throwing her head behind her to let him. 

He feels the vibration of a laugh in her throat but it’s dry and humorless like the wine she poured and he clamps his teeth down around the muscle of her neck hard enough to draw blood and there’s a sharp pain against the back of his head and his vision goes blurry for a few precious seconds while she yet again reverses them. Hector feels more than sees her stand and there’s a prickling at his scalp and a painful pressure before he realizes she’s grabbed him by a fistful of hair and is pulling him towards his bed. His vision begins to come back to him long enough to throw his hands back to catch himself as he bounces against the mattress and he feels dizzy for more than one reason as he watches her tear the clothing from her body. Her pale body is revealed to him piece by piece and any sense of fledgling arousal is overwhelmed by the sharp, absolutely vomit-inducing pain reverberating in his skull.

“You better not fall asleep on me, Hector. I’d never forgive you.”

There’s a new weight on him as she rids herself of the last bits of fur and cloth from her frame and climbs up the length of his body, settling directly on his chest and bearing her body down against the ridge of his sternum. He coughs and gasps at the additional pressure and he might just be starting to black out anyway despite her warning, but she tangles her fingers in his hair and  _ pulls  _ his head up until he’s forced up onto his elbows despite his wobbly limbs. Hector’s head threatens to roll back when her hold is reduced to a single hand and he can feel her other hand dragging sharp nails up his torso, under his blouse. It’s painful enough to make him gasp again and Lenore uses the opportunity to press her bare crotch against his face and his senses are suddenly  _ overcome  _ with her, with her smell and the touch of her hands and the lingering taste of wine on his tongue.

“Be a good boy, will you?” Lenore asks and her voice is soft again as she stares down into his eyes that are threatening to spill over with tears once more and all he can do is nod and close his eyes. She smiles and pulls his head in towards her core to grind his nose against her pubic bone before shifting her hips forward and forcing his head down and back to rest against the mattress as she mounts his face.

Hector’s hands, shaky and uncertain, come up to grasp blindly at her thighs and she untangles her fingers from his silvery hair to slip them between his own, holding tightly onto his hands and letting her head fall back as his mouth relents. Hector still hasn’t had much practice with this, if he were honest, but the slightest forward pressure of Lenore’s hips could easily close his nostrils and suffocate him and despite earlier barbs, this isn’t exactly how he wants to die. He flares his nostrils in an attempt to steady his breath even though it feels like his head is spinning at a hundred kilometers an hour and he might vomit at any moment and opens his mouth wide to take her pussy against his tongue, pressing the flat of it hard against her opening and dragging it upwards. She mewls from above him, her fingers closing tightly on his hands, and he takes it as a sign to continue his ministrations.

He works against her dutifully, sucking and licking and prodding with his tongue and mouth into every spot he can reach, rolling her folds with his tongue and dipping it slightly into her when she’s gone too quiet. She tastes strange, like nothing he’s eaten or drank before, but with an edge of sweetness that is so  _ Lenore  _ that it almost makes him wince against her. After gaining a rhythm, it was somewhat easy to forget who he was doing this with, but that simple fact reminds him with every taste. Lenore carefully directs him as he goes to her credit, though, guiding him with the movements of her hips to show him both what she likes and could do without. He’s always been a fast learner, though, so he soon is able to pick up the slack on his own despite his throbbing head that’s calming into a dull, pulsing ache behind his eyes, and she rides his face as easily as one would ride a horse, each motion of her hips forward and back pulling his tongue along her and occasionally into her.

“Hector,” Lenore gasps, breathless, and he feels a pulsing against his tongue when he shoves his nose against her and licks hard and long into her. She drops her head back and moans loud and unabashed as she moves her hips forward onto his tongue. “Hector, fingers, now.”

Hector obliges her through the fog in his brain, practically moving on autopilot, and he frees a hand from her grip to press his fingertips against her lower belly, ghosting his fingertips against her cool skin while his thumb presses hard against her clit. She nearly screams at the contact and he has to grunt out a warning when she grips his other hand too tightly, but the vibration goes straight to her core and she has to bite her lip to steady herself. He can feel her knees shaking at the sides of his head but he continues forward with a faint buzzing in his ears and for  _ fuck’s  _ sake he’s pretty sure he’s either going to vomit or forget how to breathe at this rate. He breathes in heavy pants through his nostrils against the fine hair above her cunt and the hairs tickle against the tip of his nose as he struggles to breathe properly. His thumb is clumsy and uncoordinated against her clit but she reaches her free hand down to direct his pressure and application to the way she enjoys it and he can’t find it within himself to fight her.

She gasps in quick succession, her chest heaving above him and he watches through barely-open eyes as she comes undone on top of his mouth, licking and sucking at her juices as she’s rocked by an orgasm that leaves her shaking like a leaf in the breeze. Every one of her muscles seems to tense at the same time as she clenches her pussy around his tongue and he ceases his movement to let her ride it out on his face, closing his eyes again as she grinds down against him in the final throes of her receding orgasm. 

There’s nothing but Lenore’s gentle panting for several seconds - which feel like hours while she’s still perched atop him - and Hector pulls his tongue back into his mouth as she finally, finally lifts her hips off of his face. He feels her remaining orgasm drip down his chin and cheek but he feels the menacing claws of unconsciousness beginning to take the corners of his vision and he’s finding it hard to focus on anything but the ache in his head and the emptiness in his heart.

“Oh, Hector, you look a mess. And it’s not even much after midnight!”

Something deep in him breaks at that.  _ Damn  _ these infernally long nights and  _ damn  _ Lenore and her  _ fucking  _ council for keeping him here. Tears prick at the corners of his eyes and he doesn’t try to stop them as they roll in fat rivulets down his cheeks. Bile rises in his throat and he feels dizzy.

There’s a shuffling as Lenore composes herself once more and he soon hears soft footsteps trailing away from him towards the door to the room.

“Hector?” Hector hears the footsteps stop and the door open, but there’s a pause before Lenore speaks again in which his head manufactures whispers of its own. “If it’s any consolation, you are far from the first man to fall prey to a pretty face.”

Hector lets out a sad excuse for a laugh, little more than a huff of air expelled outward. As much as he’d rather not humor her with an answer, he forces himself to speak to the cold air of the room. “And I will be far from the last, spider.”

Although he can’t see her through the blackness of his vision, he’s sure he hears and amused little laugh from her direction and he can imagine the fanged smirk on her lips. The door closes without ceremony.

As if God Himself were willing to finally grant him the mercy of nothingness, the blackness takes him from his prison and he can almost feel the cold winds on his face as he rides eastward from Styria.

**Author's Note:**

> lenore: hector can have a little pussy, as a treat
> 
> title obviously from the poem Caged Bird by Maya Angelou


End file.
